ServeRochester

A Few Bad Apples

A few year back, some process servers in New York State made some bad decisions and acted in an unethical way. In fact , it was so unethical, that rules started to change.

A large process serving firm, 350 miles from Rochester, was forwarding service across the state in large quantities. Several small time Process Server agencies across the state were hired by this company to serve papers. They low balled their fees the with a promise of a large bulk of work. This tactic isn't uncommon and these small agencies are often preyed upon because they don't know better. In fact, they go these new companies because they already chewed up and spit out the others.

These new companies started to realize, that if you lose $1.00 on every paper, bulk services starts to add up against you.

Instead of raising their rates to meet a standard, they stated reducing their expenses by falsifying their attempts and signing affidavits stating they were somewhere they weren't. Often times they were attesting to being at one address at 7pm and another address 50 miles away at 7:05pm. Not only were they unethical, they were not smart.

The investigations began and subpoenas started to fly. In the end, these agencies and the mother ship were prosecuted. Some went to jail, some were fines, and some were excommunicated from the industry. Judgments taken against thousands of defendants were reversed and had to start over at an imaginable cost to several collection firms.

The reputable companies were left once again to sweep up the mess and figure out a way to develop and ensure best practices. Technology came to the rescue.

Today, we use GPS technology to log the date and time of every attempt. These attempts include the GPS coordinates and are logged and stored on a 3rd party cloud service. This not only protects us, but it protects you as the client and those you represent.